New guy with Alexa questions

[justcrash]

Hello, and thank you for allowing me to join! I apologize if this question isn't in the right place. Mods, feel free to move it or close this and I can put it wherever you'd like me to post it.

With this tax return, I decided to go "all in" on making my home a "smart home." I work in IT so most of this has been pretty simple, but I am just not familiar enough with Alexa to know what I am doing wrong.

If these are dumb questions, forgive me. I have an Echo or a dot in every room of the house (I think 7-8 total), 3 Amazon firesticks that Alexa will not control, which seems silly to me. I bought a Roomba 680, several TP Link bulbs and outlets, a Ring door bell and floodlight (not installed yet, waiting on warmer weather. Today it is going to be 72 in Central Ohio, so of course this is a 17 hour work day for me), an Ecobee 4, and a Samsung smartthings hub.

I THINK the Smartthings hub pulled "scenes" off of the ecobee and fed them to Alexa. Shed now has scenes, good morning, good bye, I'mhome and good night.

Alexa will not recognize these scenes by any voice action I take. "Alexa, good night." "Alexa, turn on good night."

I don't know how to use "scenes" with Alexa, I guess.

Also, is it possible to use Alexa to schedule things? My goal is to get door sensors (I was hoping for a decent set of door sensors that didn't require a hub but I don't see any) to arm when I say "good night" or "good bye." I don't need notifications every time we put the dogs out.

I want to buy 3 more TP Link bulbs for outside, can Alexa to schedule those to turn on/turn off with sunset/sunrise?

Tl;dr version:

• How do I use scenes with Alexa?
  Can I add things to "scenes" to get multiple devices to do actions I set up in advance?
  Can I schedule lights to turn on/off with a schedule with the equipment I have?

[dragon123]

Try renaming the scenes in the app. "Good night", "I'm home", "goodbye", "good morning" etc are trigger sentences for alexa, probably not a good idea to use those as names for scenes/groups/items.

I've never used scenes as 'stand-alone' commands in alexa. What I know you CAN do is make routines with those names, ie "Alexa, good night" and have her execute scenes and other stuff one after the other.

For instance, my own "Alexa, start my day" routine does this:
- set livingroom lights scene "dimmed"
- turn on my server
- report weather
- report traffic
- play news from flash briefing

And my "good night" routine does this:
- turn off all lights
- turn off my server
- turn off my harmony hub (tv, stereo, settopbox)
- turn off my 3D printer
- report weather
- says "goodnight. Talk to you tomorrow."

You can also use routine to schedule things. So instead of a spoken command to tun the routine, you set it to run at a scheduled time. Not sure about sunrise/sunset, my hue lights can do that using the hue app, but not sure if alexa can. Maybe someone else here knows?

[justcrash]

Try renaming the scenes in the app. "Good night", "I'm home", "goodbye", "good morning" etc are trigger sentences for alexa, probably not a good idea to use those as names for scenes/groups/items.

I've never used scenes as 'stand-alone' commands in alexa. What I know you CAN do is make routines with those names, ie "Alexa, good night" and have her execute scenes and other stuff one after the other.

For instance, my own "Alexa, start my day" routine does this:
- set livingroom lights scene "dimmed"
- report weather
- report traffic
- play news from flash briefing

And my "good night" routine does this:
- turn off all lights
- turn off my harmony hub (tv, stereo, settopbox)
- turn off my 3D printer
- report weather
- says "goodnight. Talk to you tomorrow."

Thank you for responding! How did you attach those activities to that voice command? What are the magic words I should be able to say to initiate a routine? And again, I apologize if these are dumb. I understand technology but not how Alexa functions... lol.

[dragon123]

Thank you for responding! How did you attach those activities to that voice command? What are the magic words I should be able to say to initiate a routine? And again, I apologize if these are dumb. I understand technology but not how Alexa functions... lol.

In the app, there is a menu item 'routines'. I don't see it on the website.

[justcrash]

Thank you for responding! How did you attach those activities to that voice command? What are the magic words I should be able to say to initiate a routine? And again, I apologize if these are dumb. I understand technology but not how Alexa functions... lol.

In the app, there is a menu item 'routines'. I don't see it on the website.

Thank you, I'll check it out.

[kenf]

I'm about to get my SmartThings Hub to augment my lame ADT Pulse hub.

Similar setup to you, Alexa in every room.  I did GE z-wave smart switches (which ADT doesn't expose as Smart Home devices, unlike SmartThings).  Didn't know that when I signed up with ADT and got the first switches.

Definitely not an expert on ST yet, but like you, a techy (programmer in my case).  Take a look at ST Virtual Switches and IFTTT.com.  I hear ST can create a virtual switch which mimics a real switch.  No use for it except to hook up logical events.  I suspect that like real switches, they are exposed to Alexa as Smart Home Devices that you can command.

In my case, I intend to use IFTTT to capture ADT alarm changes (via gmail) and relay that to ST to a virtual switch, which can then be reacted to by Alexa Routines or ST Routines.

In your case, you could do an Alexa Routine that sets the virtual switch to On, which you have a ST Routine to react to that switch going on to then set a ST Scene.

There's got to be an Alexa command to speak that tells ST to run your Scene, but if not, or if you hit some other weird bridging problem, keep IFTTT and virtual switches in mind as a relay.

I'll know more about how that can work in a few days (come on Prime!).  But you could look into it now and see if that might solve your problem.